Yes, 100% material based. I’ve seen these things done. Material designers are wizards. I’m a game play mechanics and netcode guy.
Skeletal meshes are heavy. Especially if you want Physics. You’ll need a physics asset class for the ragdoll. Imagine 100 trees chopped, partially chopped in a scene.
Chopped tree actor is 2 “static” meshes. The Stump and the chopped off part.
As soon as the first chop is made you need to have the new actor spawned, Chop counted and its damage applied… And the HISM foliage instance removed. The chops (int) needs to be a Repnotify and the actor itself needs a sizeable netcull distance.
Say you have 50 trees in the area that have been chopped down. When a player walks into that area for the first time you want all the previous chopped down trees to be spawned and felled. BUT you do not want this player to see them fall. These are old actions to game play, but new to them.
The onrep function will handle the felling based on the number of chops applied. The netcull distance ensures they fall well before they can be seen falling. Unless they are in the NCD at the time of the final chop.
Glitching can happen to skeletal meshes too. Never seen a player get shot to the moon bumping into a static mesh or another player? It happens. Performance wise, especially on a potentially large scale the static mesh would be the better component.